The dissertation considers how the anonymous authors of six moral and religious pseudo-ballade refrain poems first attested in the late fourteenth-century Vernon manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. poet.a.1) manipulate devices such as speaking persona, word-play, and allegory in ways that support rhetorical strategies hitherto unrecognized in Middle English lyric. The study begins with stemmatic analyses that identify, as far as is possible from the physical record, the archetypal text, or "work," of each poem. Chapter One then provides an overview of scholarship that has focussed on two important technical devices used in the Vernon refrain lyrics-the speaking voice and the refrain---and articulates how the lyrics use those devices in hitherto unrecognized ways. Chapter One concludes by considering the kinds of word-play found in other Middle English literature, in order to define that found in the Vernon lyrics. In the next six chapters, each of the six "works" is considered as a communicative event. Using mainly historicist, formalist, and reader-response methodologies, I explore, for each poem in turn, how the poet moulds language to signify indirectly so that the message is communicated figuratively, and how the implied audience is cast into a specific role vis-a-vis the communicative action in a way that inflects the message. I also explore how the rhetorical strategies of the poems are informed by various theories of signification, which are defined in relation to the socio-linguistic circumstances and philosophical currents of the time, and consider the poems in relation to other medieval, mostly earlier Middle English, lyrics. In the Conclusion, findings are assembled to indicate how the recovery of the Vernon refrain lyrics' rhetorical art expands the parameters that currently define Middle English lyric. I also turn from considering the implied audience of the "works" to considering the historical audience of the Vernon manuscript, and suggest that the recovery of the Vernon refrain lyrics' rhetorical art bolsters theories that maintain the Vernon manuscript was intended, at least in part, for an upper gentry or aristocratic audience, and that its thorough Englishness is more of a polemic assertion of the strength of the English language than a reflection of socio-linguistic conditions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/6051 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Woollam, Angela M. |
| Contributors | Jeffrey, David, |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 319 p. |
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